Be With You
2018 · Directed by Lee Jang-hoon
Original language: Korean
- romance
- drama
- fantasy
The story
Along with his young son, Ji-ho, Woo-jin misses his wife Soo-a, who died after promising to return a year later with the rainy season. Miraculously, they reunite with Soo-a when the rainy season comes around, but she has no memory of her husband and son whom she dearly loved.
What it’s like
Soft, washed-out greens and grey-blue rain dominate this Korean romance, with Lee Jang-hoon framing ordinary apartment rooms, school corridors and rain-slicked streets in unhurried, mostly static shots that let the light do the emotional work. The palette leans gentle and naturalistic, the sound design lets raindrops and quiet domestic noise carry the scenes, and the piano-led score swells only at the tender peaks. The pacing is slow and deliberate, and the register is melancholy with a steady warmth: a grieving father and son slowly learning to share their days with a woman who has forgotten them, and the quiet ache of first love returning in a new shape. Violence is absent; the intensity is emotional, with sustained sadness and several tearjerker moments around death and separation. It suits a rainy Sunday, a comfort cry, or a quiet evening alone, and it will appeal most to viewers who want romance and family grief handled with patience, sincerity and sentiment rather than spectacle.
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